Researchers tracking wild polar bears in northern Canada have witnessed something exceedingly rare: a mother bear adopting a cub that was not biologically her own. <\/p>\n
The five-year-old mother bear and her 10- to 11-month-old cubs were observed and captured on camera during the annual polar bear migration along the Western Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba, a town known for its polar bear population.<\/p>\n
“It’s unusual,” Alyssa McCall, a scientist at Polar Bears International, said in a video. “We don’t really know why it happens… but we know it doesn’t happen often at all.”<\/p>\n
It’s only the 13th known case of adoption out of the 4,600 bears studied for nearly five decades in the area. <\/p>\n
The mother bear was first captured as she emerged from her maternity den this spring. At the time, she had one cub, which scientists tagged for study.<\/p>\n
In the fall, she was seen again, but this time with two cubs – the original cub that had been tagged and another without a tag. Researchers aren’t sure what happened to the new cub’s biological mother, but they are trying to identify her with genetic samples. <\/p>\n
“The bears need all the help they can get these days with climate change,” Evan Richardson, a polar bear scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said in a video statement. “If females have the opportunity to pick up another cub and care for it and successfully wean it, it’s a good thing for bears in Churchill.”<\/p>\n
Polar bears in the wild only have a 50% chance of surviving into adulthood, but having a mother caring for them improves their odds. <\/p>\n
The cubs appear to be healthy, researchers said, and they will likely stay with their mother until they are about two-and-a-half years old. <\/p>\n
Next, the family is expected to head out to sea ice, where the cubs will learn from their mother how to hunt seals and survive on their own. <\/p>\n
“It’s just nice to know that the bears are looking out for each other,” Richardson said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers tracking wild polar bears in northern Canada have witnessed something exceedingly rare: a mother bear adopting a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-197316","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}